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It's Newt: Be vivid, Mitt

By MAGGIE HABERMAN

10/01/2012 02:05 PM EDT

Newt Gingrich offered more blunt advice for Mitt Romney today, telling POLITICO that the problem for the candidate is not the multiple messages he has had since the Republican National Covention, but the way he is delivering them.

"I actually think that the nature of a general election campaign is such at the presidential level (that) the media is such an enormous part of it... You can win primaries by raising enough money to win a power boat. But nobody including the President of the United States has enough resources to build a power boat in a general election…and so you’re always sailing. You don’t have the power to drive straight through it," said Gingrich, when asked about the latest messaging push by Boston.

His concern about the way the Romney campaign is performing "would be there’s an agility (needed in terms of) of taking your general themes and turning it into immediate messages. … We live in an era where because of the totality of electronic media you have to have a three hour turnaround."

In a riff off a Margaret Thatcher line, he said, "My sense is they’re more comfortable making the presentation than they are winning the argument and that’s a real challenge. If you’re the conservative candidate you are inevitably going to be in arguments…(because you have a) viewpoint and philosophy …that’s in conflict with about 85 percent of the national media."

"Romney right now should be all over Obama (over the Mideast)…there’s just such a total disarray (there)," he said. "You look …. this involved the killing of an American ambassador and three other Americans…it is a disaster and yet it just sort of floats by and that’s Romney’s challenge. You can’t expect Obama to do it. And I think what happens is two things. They all say to each other oh gosh we got to stay focused on the economy well - I don’t know what that means."

The "mess in the Middle East" could fit into Romney's prescriptions about energy, which are in his jobs plan, Gingrich said, but "I don’t hear him say, it I don’t hear him explain it."

"I think that there are some people who advise the governor who believe that simple repetition of a mantra will get you there," he said. "And I explicitly don’t believe that. I think you in fact have to engage the American people, which means you have to engage the news media, which means you have to take your mantra and fit it into very specific illustrations that fit that day’s topics."

In other words, he argued, the problem isn't a bunch of different messages, but the way Romney is handling the opportunities that present themselves, such as manufacturing data and other economic indicators.

"They’re getting ammunition every morning now," he said. "This is a race which should be fairly easy to win. And the first thing they’ve got to do is decide that the methodical slow careful way they’ve been going puts them totally out of step with the modern media and means they can’t win the arguments."